One-Third Didn’t Return Census Forms

Posted on Apr 17, 2010

Maybe it’s laziness or maybe it’s privacy concerns, but the U.S. Census Bureau reports that 32 percent of all U.S. households receiving census questionnaires did not return them ahead of Friday’s official deadline. Come May 1, census workers will begin pounding on the doors of the laggards. —JCL

The New York Times:

Nearly one in three Americans failed to return their census questionnaires by Friday’s official deadline, the Census Bureau said.

More forms were expected to be received over the weekend. Census workers will not begin going door to door until May 1 to count people who did not return their questionnaires by mail.

As of early Friday, the mail participation rate was 68 percent. The mail participation rate, which the bureau is using this year for the first time, is the percentage of forms mailed back by households that received them.

Unlike the mail response rate, which the census used in earlier counts, it excludes forms returned by the postal service as undeliverable, often because a house or apartment was vacant. The mail response rate was 67 percent in 2000. If the undeliverable forms had been excluded then, the mail participation rate would have been 72 percent.